Month: October 2018

November is the month when writers-bloggers disappear and go radio silent as they set to do a Nanowrimo or similar writing ordeal. I’m going to do something like that but, if all goes well, I won’t go silent.

On MeWe.com I joined a group that put forward the idea of writing a flash story (500-1000 words or so) a day for the entire month. I believe that’s harder than a straightforward writing marathon, not due to the quantity of output but quality, since writing 10 one-thousand-word stories is usually harder than just a single ten-thousand-word story. Still, that’s the goal, or the ideal anyway, and that’s what I’m aiming for.

Before I had jumped into that project, I actually already had another one in mind for this month: posting a writing-related post each day. I had even written down the list, but I doubt I’ll be able to do both things. However, it may be a good filler for those days when, for one reason or another, the stories fail to appear.

So, basically, I’ll write whatever I fell like writing, mostly fiction, but whatever pours forth from the muses. Adventure, horror, parody, the most exciting retelling of watching paint dry… whatever I come up with. I already have a few ideas for some stories, but I’ll mostly improvise. Naturally, that, and time constraints, means quality and themes will be varied. But I’ll try to churn out some quality e-pulp, that’s for sure.

I was going over a piece I had written when I found this seemingly innocuous sentence: “He talked to them in his crude Japanese and told that there was a group of Chinese civilians, around twenty, that was coming in their direction.” I usually do two or three proofings of the stuff I write, and this is why the second one is so important, to catch stuff like that.

Now, the sentence may not be awful, but it made me cringe a bit because I felt I heard it scream something like “I have been written by an amateur! Come and take a look!” Without much effort, I rewrote it into this:

“He talked to them in his crude Japanese and told them a group of twenty Chinese civilians was coming their way.”